History of Graydon & Parkwood - Donalda

The historic house known to this area is Graydon Hall, from which this area is derived it's name. This English-Manor-Style home was built in 1936 by financier Henry Rupert Bain. It's quite likely Graydon Hall was named after the "Gray" family who, from the 1820s until the 1914s, operated a grist mill on the banks of the "Don" River where the Donalda Golf Course is located today. 

Graydon's first landowners were the Duncan, family who put down their roots in this area during 1800s. Henry Duncan, the family patriarch, was elected to the York Township Council in 1870 and served for numerous years. It was Henry's son David who farmed the land where the Graydon neighborhood is now located. 

In the late '80s and early '90s, Dr. Mima Kapches of the Royal Ontario Museum conducted a variety of archaeological digs in some of the backyards that line the Brookbanks Park ravine. During a dig in the fall of 1987 she uncovered a Meadowood-cache blade dating from 1000 BC, making it one of the oldest ever discovered. Continued excavation the following year uncovered a variety of Middle Archaic period artifacts, including a small pebble that displayed a human face in effigy, believed to have been created in 4,700 B.C. making it one of the oldest dated human representations in northeastern North America. From 1988 to 1990, digs in an adjacent backyard revealed a wealth of Early Iroquoian pottery (ca. AD 1000), as well as the remnants of an "open-pit firing event," a site that would have been used in its production. These discoveries have led local archaeologists to hypothesize that the ravine surrounding Deerlick Creek may have once served as a seasonal pottery production and firing campsite.